Dear Internet: Stop Using George Lucas As Your Punching Bag

This is something that needed to be said for a long time, but after seeing what seems to be the 10,000th snarky YouTube video making fun of George Lucas I decided to write this up. For the last twenty years (yes, really) the Internet has been using George Lucas as its punching bag. It started in 1996 when the Star Wars Special Editions were first announced, as how dare George Lucas make the superior editions of his movies by fixing all the effects issues they had for their first two decades.

Of course then the real hate began when Lucas decided to make three more movies in his kid-friendly franchise and the people who were kids during the Original Trilogy couldn’t understand why Lucas didn’t make a grown up Star Wars movie for them. Just because you grew up, it doesn’t mean Star Wars had to.

With all of the dumb reasons people have for using George Lucas as their personal internet punching bag, they forget why people looked up to him prior to 1996:

Created Star Wars

Co-Created Indiana Jones

Started Pixar

Started ILM

Drove the technological revolution in filmmaking that resulted in many of the tools used today.

That’s right, Pixar began as the Graphics Group within Lucasfilm in 1979. So if it wasn’t for George Lucas, you wouldn’t have all of those Pixar movies. If it wasn’t for all of that “evil CG” in the Prequels, you wouldn’t even have The Force Awakens now (as every VFX shot in that movie was CG). The modern blockbuster wouldn’t even exist in 2016 if it wasn’t for George Lucas putting together a little warehouse to produce the effects for Star Wars, the end result of which was ILM.

So instead of repeatedly making un-funny YouTube videos that try to make jokes at Lucas’ expense, maybe spend your time on the internet making fun of something that deserves it; like Ghostbusters (2016).